Statistical analysis

5.3.3.1. OUTCOME VARIABLE

The outcome variable of interest is the school attendance in district i at time t. In the current study, we consider two types of school attendance variables. First, school enrolment measures the school attendance variables as the percentages of children age 7 to 15 enrolled in primary school. The second type of school attendance is school absenteeism that is measured by the percentage of primary school students absent from school due to health complaint(s) during the past month.

5.3.3.2. INDEPENDENT VARIABLES

The main predictors in this study are quality of the water source, location of the water source, and the prevalence of diarrhoea in district i at time t. Good quality water is captured by the percentage of households with access to piped and bottled water. Following (Mangyo, 2008) who uses the water access within yard as the physical proximity of a drinking water source to the dwelling, in the current study nearby (location)

0 20 40 60 0 20 40 60 1994 1999 2004 2009 2014 1994 1999 2004 2009 2014 1994 1999 2004 2009 2014

National Sumatera Jawa

Bali & NT Kalimantan Sulawesi

percentage school absenteeism per district Average school absenteeism per region

Sc ho ol Ab se n te e is m % year Graphs by island

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water source is measured by the percentage of households having access to a private water facility as opposed to sources that are shared or public. Diarrhoea prevalence is measured by the percentage of school-aged children who suffered from diarrhoea in the past month (preceding the Susenas survey).

Control variables are household wealth, parents’ education, urbanization, health facilities coverage, access to improved sanitation, as well as a cultural factor. All control variables are at the district level. Household wealth is measured by the average monthly food expenditure in the given district. For each district, parents’ education is calculated as the average years of education of both father and mother. The cultural factor is measured by the relative difference between mother’s and father’s education years (the ratio of mother divided by father education years). Urbanization is specified as the percentage of population living in urban areas in each district. Furthermore, there are two other control variables for the diarrhoea prevalence model, namely: the coverage of health facilities in a district as measured by the percentage of birth assisted by a skilled health care worker such as doctor, midwife, or paramedic; and the access to improved sanitation is computed by the percentage of households that have a private toilet with septic tank.

5.3.3.3. PANEL ANALYSIS

Our model is based on the assumption that school attendance is a linear function of access to a nearby water source, diarrhoea prevalence, control variables, time trend and district fixed effects. Moreover, we assume that diarrhoea prevalence is determined by the quality of water, the location of water source and a set of control variables. The diarrhoea model needs to be tested in the first place as the indirect effect of water on schooling (the contamination effect) to be exist when the effect of water on diarrhoea is evident. In order to explore how the effect of the main variables varies over time, we computed interactions between the main explanatory variables and a time trend.

These models are then estimated by a panel fixed effect method that allows for district specific intercepts. The district fixed effects captures the variability over the regions as well as the effects of omitted variables. These models take into account both the cross section and time series variation in all variables. In principle, these models capture the long run relationship between the variables of interest while taking the advantage of the time series variation in the data.

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5.4. Results

The main aim of this paper is to examine both the direct and indirect effects of clean water on two school attendance variables, i.e. school absenteeism and school enrolment. The direct effect, or the water collection problem, occurs when the children suffer from tiredness and have less time to study, as they have to collect water outside their premises. The indirect effect is the water contamination problem that arises when the household has no access to safe clean water as a result of which the children have a higher chance of getting diarrhoea and therefore could not attend school. To shed more light on these effects, we start with the (static) panel fixed effect model that is preceded by a short description of the statistical characteristics of all variables in the model. Thereafter, some robustness checks are presented. Note that only the effect of the variables of main interest (percentage households using piped and bottled water, percentage households with private water facility, and diarrhoea prevalence) are presented in the tables. The full table of results can be found in the Appendix.

Table 5.1 Descriptive statistics of selected variables for 259 Districts in Indonesia, 1994 - 2014

Variables Mean Mean

(level) (change)

Primary school enrolment (%) 90.10 0.42

Student absent from school (%) 12.91 0.16

Diarrhoea prevalence (7-15 years; %) 0.88 0.01

Household using piped and bottled water (%) 25.69 1.03

Household with private water facility (%) 56.84 1.05

Household have improved sanitation (%) 36.06 1.66

Health facilities coverage (%) 66.26 1.88

Average food expenditure (000,000 IDR) 0.70 0.07

Mean years of parents' education 6.78 0.13

Relative difference of mother & father education years 0.89 0.01

Household living in urban area (%) 39.75 0.61

Table 5.1 presents the descriptive characteristics of the main and control variables for 259 districts in Indonesia from 1994 to 2014. The average level of primary school enrolment is 90% with an average annual change of 0.4 percentage points. On average 13% of these students are absent from school due to health complaints. Over the period, almost 1% of the primary school students suffered from diarrhoea. Overall, about 26% households use piped and bottled water (good quality water source) as the main drinking water source. Moreover, 57% households have access to a nearby water source. The hygiene level is quite low as indicated by the low access to improved sanitation (36%) with a low rate of improvement (1.7 percentage points per year). The coverage of health facilities in the

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country, over the period, is 66% and each year it increases by almost 2 percentage points. Even though the average primary school enrolment is quite high, the average education level of the parents is still low, namely 6.8 years. On average, the relative difference of mother and father education years is 0.89. This indicates that the education level of mothers is lower than that of fathers. Lastly, about 40% of households are living in urban areas.